Women of the Beat Generation

This is a space that focuses on giving voice to and sharing ideas about the women of the Beat Generation.

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

The deadline has been extended to March 15th for submissions!

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

75 Reasons to Live: Rebecca Solnit on Jay DeFeo’s The Verónica

Rebecca Solnit talks Jay DeFeo!

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

“I’m in a rogue state, Mr. President Don’t tell me what to do Your rules aren’t my rules Cause I’m the Lady of Misrule”

-Anne Waldman “Rogue State”

[beatdom]

We are now open to submissions for Beatdom #18. The topic is FAMILY – meaning that we will consider essays, short stories, poetry, and artwork relating to the Beat Generation and the subject of family. We are willing to consider the topic in the widest sense, but if you have something slightly outside of the …

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

we fled the norm for women then, because to live it would have been a kind of death.

Hettie Jones on herself and artist Helene Dorn from the brand new collection of letters “Love H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones”

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

Love, H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones

Love, H: The Letters of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones chronicles a forty year friendship through their correspondence, as well as Jones’ occasional fragments of narrative, from the early sixties until Dorn’s death in 2004. It isn’t just a collection of letters; it includes faxes and e-mails. It covers a wide range of subjects – …

Sharing from another excellent Beat source, Beatdom.

 News about a new book from Hettie Jones, Love H: The Letter of Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones. The book publishes the long term correspondence of these two artists. Excited for this publication, as I am constantly fielding the question of whether or not the female artists of the Beat generation had female centric spaces or friendships where they were able to support one another and discuss their art. So often the answer is uncertain or a recognition that many of these women were not talking about themselves as artists at the time. This collection adds to and changes that conversation by showing a life long bond between these two as women, as mothers, as artists, and as friends. 

Looking forward to this text!

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

Five Ways the Beat Generation Transformed Pop Culture

We reflect on the seminal strands of the Beats' impressive legacy, to coincide with the Pompidou's exhaustive exhibition

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

Beat Museum Announces Yearlong Monthly Performance Series | Hoodline

Building on the success of last summer's Beat Shindig, the Beat Museum will host Beat-themed events every month for a year.

If you are in the San Francisco area, catch ruth weiss at the Beat Museum tonight! 

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

2016 Conference, Manchester, UK

Registration Please note that the site for registration will close on May 25, as will the Visit Manchester site for special EBSN discounted hotel rates. If you’re interested in attending, the day r…

This years European Beat Studies Network conference is fast approaching. Artists, scholars, students, and writers will be gathering in Manchester next month to discuss the Beats, music and science. If you are in the area and are interested check out the conference program here!

[thegoldeneternity]

we are transmuting we are as soft and warm and trembling as a new gold butterfly the energy indescribable almost unendurable at night sometimes I see our bodies glow

Lenore Kandel (via thegoldeneternity)

[beatdom]

Selections from <em>The Beats Abroad</em> by Bill Morgan

The Beats Abroad: A Global Guide to the Beat Generation presents the fourth installment in Bill Morgan's Beat Guidebooks, this time chronicling the travels of America's greatest countercultures' many international visits. While the Beat Generation claims its roots in New…

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

Check out this video over at the Whitney's website on Defeo's icon piece, the Rose.

[irresponsiblewanderlustofthesoul]

“‘Someday you are going to go out at night and look at the stars and you will wonder how they got there. Then you’ll study like I studied, and you’ll suffer like I suffered, and in the end you’ll find nothing.’ I was not very old but I didn’t flinch at that 'nothing’. Only I knew with my full child’s certitude that it wasn’t true. Or anyway the despair that accompanied the word had no truth, however much he felt it.”

-Diane Di Prima (via irresponsiblewanderlustofthesoul)

[itsfromabook]

“We tend to make up the people we fall in love with.”

Joyce Johnson, Bad Connections (via itsfromabook)

[beatdom]

Naropa University and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics are honored to host Anne Waldman on Friday, February 26, 2016 on the Naropa University Arapahoe Campus in the Performing Art Center, 2130 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO at 7:30 p.m.  Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, curator, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, where she has worked for 40 years. Please join us for an evening of poetry and dialogue.  Admission is free.

Read More…

[womenofthebeatgeneration]

This volume brings women's contribution to Beat literature, art, and their milieu out of the shadows, expanding the "Beat canon" to include and discuss works and persons which are frequently overlooked. By opening up the borders of scholarly discourse and letting new voices, images, and discussions enter, a fuller picture of Beat culture in America can be seen. Out of the Shadows: Beat Women Are Not Beaten Women presents the newest research on the female beats in literature, art, and culture, discussing pioneer figures such as Hettie Jones, Ruth Weiss, Joan Haverty Kerouac, Diane di Prima, Joyce Johnson, Carolyn Cassady, and Jay DeFeo, as well as even lesser known writers and artists, such as Jane Bowles, Bernice Bing, and Elisabeth Von Vogt.

[h00p5]

Rant - Diane Di Prima

You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology a cosmogony laid out, before all eyes there is no part of yourself you can separate out saying, this is memory, this is sensation this is the work I care about, this is how I make a living it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole you do not “make” it so there is nothing to integrate, you are a presence you are an appendage of the work, the work stems from hangs from the heaven you create every man / every woman carries a firmament inside & the stars in it are not the stars in the sky w/out imagination there is no memory w/out imagination there is no sensation w/out imagination there is no will, desire history is a living weapon in yr hand & you have imagined it, it is thus that you “find out for yourself” history is the dream of what can be, it is the relation between things in a continuum of imagination what you find out for yourself is what you select out of an infinite sea of possibility no one can inhabit yr world yet it is not lonely, the ground of imagination is fearlessness discourse is video tape of a movie of a shadow play but the puppets are in yr hand your counters in a multidimensional chess which is divination & strategy the war that matters is the war against the imagination all other wars are subsumed in it. the ultimate famine is the starvation of the imagination it is death to be sure, but the undead seek to inhabit someone else’s world the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism the ultimate claustrophobia is “it all adds up” nothing adds up & nothing stands in for anything else THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST THE IMAGINATION ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT There is no way out of a spiritual battle There is no way you can avoid taking sides There is no way you can not have a poetics no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher you do it in the consciousness of making or not making yr world you have a poetics: you step into the world like a suit of readymade clothes or you etch in light your firmament spills into the shape of your room the shape of the poem, of yr body, of yr loves A woman’s life / a man’s life is an allegory Dig it There is no way out of the spiritual battle the war is the war against the imagination you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector the war of the worlds hangs here, right now, in the balance it is a war for this world, to keep it a vale of soul-making the taste in all our mouths is the taste of power and it is bitter as death bring yr self home to yrself, enter the garden the guy at the gate w/ the flaming sword is yrself the war is the war for the human imagination and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you The imagination is not only holy, it is precise it is not only fierce, it is practical men die everyday for the lack of it, it is vast & elegant intellectus means “light of the mind” it is not discourse it is not even language the inner sun the polis is constellated around the sun the fire is central